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imagining my father in a jumpsuit with a tool belt, cords dangling from his hands.
    “No, it was a real choice,” Sara said. “I wasn’t … well, I knew that there was a reason we had met, and when a few weeks later I found out I was pregnant, I knew the reason we had met was going to be you.”
    Sara’s had the safe-sex talk with all of us, but to her credit, she’s never said, “You have to have safe sex,” because she obviously didn’tin my case. What she says is, “Be aware of the choices you are making and accept responsibility for them.”
    “So when you found out you were pregnant,” I said, “you called him.”
    “Well, no.” Sara shook her head. “I didn’t have a phone number for him actually.”
    “Oh.” I wondered where I had gotten the idea that she called him. It had been a long time since we had had the “your father” conversation.
    “But you did see him again. To tell him about me.”
    “Yes, we saw each other on the train.”
    “The train?” I asked. “Like, a
train
train, or the subway?”
    “The subway, Luke,” Sara said, patiently.
    “How long had it … I mean, when was this?”
    “Oh, well, let’s see … awhile … it was a few months before you were born.”
    I thought.
    “So you were pregnant when you saw him again,” I stated. “On the subway.”
    “Well, I was pregnant since the night I had met him!”
    “I mean … visibly pregnant,” I persisted, shaping a phantom hump in front of my stomach. “Big, I mean.”
    “Mm-hm,” Sara nodded.
    “So he guessed?” I said. “When he saw you, he was like, Did I do that?”
    Sara laughed a little.
    “It was funny. He knew. Right away, he knew. He looked at me and he said—oh, I don’t remember exactly what, but he knew. And we got off the train at the Sixty-sixth Street stop and we sat by the fountain at Lincoln Center and we talked all about it.”
    “What did he say?” I thought that the scenario sounded like the kind of movie Mark Franco didn’t do. Mark Franco did movies where if people met each other in a subway train, they started fighting,or slipped a tracer into the other one’s pocket, or yelled, “Everybody get DOWN!”
    “Did he freak out?” I asked. For the first time I was really trying to imagine my father’s side of this whole thing, and it seemed like freaking out was probably a reasonable response.
    Sara let a little silence elapse before she answered.
    “There was no freaking out.” Sara leaned back and switched over to her guided meditation voice and started explaining about how my father wasn’t in a place where he could be there for me, etc., but how ready and eager for me she was and how they were really honest with each other and how he came to see me right after I was born and held me and some other stuff but I wasn’t really listening because I had already heard all of that and I was still trying to picture my father by that fountain.
    Also I was thinking that Sara left it all to chance, really, that she would see my father again, and if they hadn’t been on the same subway car he might never have known I existed. That part was definitely new. I didn’t say anything more to Sara about it, though. What I was thinking was something along the lines of, “Okay, seriously, what the hell,” but I needed some privacy to organize my ideas, so I just told her I understood, and stuff like that.
    Saturday I took the train to New York City to see my sisters and tell them the news. Aurora, uptown at Columbia, and Pearl, downtown at NYU, met my train in midtown, at Penn Station.
    “We thought a walk through Central Park.” Aurora waved an umbrella and a Zabar’s bag at me. “Kind of a late-winter picnic.”
    “What’s up?” asked Pearl. “Sara called us both last night. We’ve been told to ‘be there’ for you.”
    “Pearl thinks it might be girl trouble,” Aurora said.
    “Is it SEX?” hissed Pearl, leering at me over her (not Starbucks) coffee.
    “Shut up,” I